In justification of man-worship, it may also be pleaded that if the nature-deity is truer, the man-deity is nearer to us and more capable of vivid realization. And as it is from the sympathetic recognition of life in our fellow men that we proceed to the recognition of life in the so-called inanimate universe, so it is by the contemplation of the highest types of humanity that we are able to refine and exalt our conception of divinity.
The two great sources of religious thought, personification and deification, are constantly intermingling their streams and reacting upon each other. A deity who begins his career as a Nature-God often in course of time loses this quality, and becomes hardly distinguishable from a magnified man. The Zeus of Homer is an example. He is much more the Father of Gods and men than a Sky or Weather-God. In Japan it is only the scholar who recognizes in Susa no wo the deity of the Rain-storm. To the people even Tenshōdaijin (the Sun Goddess) is nothing more than the great providential deity who resides at Ise. Her solar quality is practically forgotten. Men, on the other hand, may be exalted to such a height by the ascription to them of nature-powers that their original humanity is much obscured.
It is sometimes difficult to determine to which of the two currents of religious thought a particular deity belongs. For example, we find a sword worshipped as a deity. Is it on account of its wonderful cutting property, or because it was once an offering to a nature or a man-deity, and had therefore at length absorbed to itself a portion of his divinity? Or is it the Excalibur of some forgotten deified chieftain? There is no general answer to such questions. They must be decided, if at all, by the evidence in each case. To call objects of this kind "fetishes" helps us nothing. In the Yengishiki we find mention of a shrine to Iha no hime (the lady of the rock). At first sight this looks like a Nature-God. But when we find that an Iha no hime was the mother of the Mikado Richiu (end of fourth century) it seems more probable that the Iha no hime of this shrine was a deified mortal.
In Shinto it is the first of the two great currents of religious thought with which we are chiefly concerned. It is based much more on the conception-fragmentary, shallow, and imperfect as it is-of the universe as sentient than on the recognition of pre-eminent qualities in human beings, alive or dead. It springs primarily from gratitude to-and, though in a less degree, fear of-the great natural powers on which our existence depends. The desire to commemorate the virtues and services of great men and to perpetuate a loving remembrance of departed parents and forefathers takes a secondary place.
Classification of Deities. – Both Nature-Gods and Man-Gods may be deities of individuals, of classes, or of abstract qualities. We have, therefore, six classes of Gods, as follows: -
Individuals, as the Sun.
Classes, as the God of Trees.
Properties, as the God of Growth.
Individuals, as Temmangu.
Classes, as Koyane.
Properties, as Ta-jikara no wo (Hand-strength-male).
This is the logical sequence; but it by no means follows that all Gods of individuals precede all Gods of classes, or that there were no deities of abstractions before some of the later individual or class deities were evolved.
The distinction between individual objects deified and deities of classes is not always well maintained in Shinto. It is doubtful, for example, whether Kamado no Kami is the God of all cooking furnaces, or whether there is a separate God for each. Different worshippers might give different answers. The habitual neglect by the Japanese nation of the grammatical distinction between singular and plural is a potent obstacle to clearness in such matters.
Phases of Conception. – The conception of individual parts of the universe as deities passes through the phases represented in the following formulas: -
I. The Sun (Moon, Wind, Sea, &c.) is alive.
II. The Sun is a man, a father, a chief or a king-first rhetorically, and then literally.
III. The Sun is a material object, ruled by an unseen but not incorporeal being with human form and passions.
IV. The Sun is (a) a material object ruled by an anthropomorphic being which has a spiritual double, or (b)is animated by a spiritual being.
These formulas exhibit the logical sequence of development. In practice the various phases are found to overlap one another considerably. Even in the latest Shinto the direct conception of the natural object as alive is not forgotten.
The first stage,6 in which we have the religious conception before it is clothed in myth or metaphor, is abundantly exemplified in Shinto. A well, for example, is, like Horace's "Fons Bandusiæ," worshipped without name or myth attached to it, or anything to show whether it is regarded as male or female. The same is the case with sites, buildings, provinces, trees, all of which are deified and have religious rites in their honour without any very definite personality being attributed to them. They are simply thought of as in some sort of way living things. Mud and sand are dubbed Kami, and there the personification ends. There are a good many colourless deities of this kind in Shinto. Motoöri declares explicitly that when a sea or a mountain is called Kami, it is not the spirit of the sea or mountain which is meant, but the sea or mountain itself. A poet of the Manyoshiu says of Fujiyama: -
Of Yamato, the Land of Sunrise,
It is the peace-giver, it is the God,
It is the treasure.
When a kitchen wench at the present day speaks of the Hettsui-sama-sama is a honorific and personifying word-she means the cooking-furnace itself regarded as a God, not a spirit inhabiting it. She will even speak of the plasterer making a Hettsui-sama.
The second or anthropomorphic stage of the development of the idea of God arises out of the rhetorical necessity of rendering more vivid, even at the expense of exact truth, the presentation of the conception of the powers of nature as living things. Finding that the bare assertion that they are alive produces little impression, the poet or seer goes a step further, and boldly ascribes to them human form, passions, actions, and character. Myth and metaphor are his instruments. The God has bodily parts, parents, sex, and children. He eats, drinks, is angry or alarmed, loves, fights, weaves, cultivates the ground, fishes, hunts, and dies. With the advance of social organization he is a chief or a king. Sometimes in these metaphors we can trace a special application to the deity's natural functions. Sometimes they are introduced merely for general effect. The results of this process for good and for evil are written large in the pages of human history. It is, on the one hand, the indispensable means by which the high intuitions of the seer are brought home, more or less imperfectly, to the multitude. On the other hand, the true original nature divinity is often lost sight of in a profusion of anthropomorphic fancies, and nothing is left but a magnified man, whose ultimate fate it is to be disavowed by advancing knowledge and enlightenment.
It has been said that the primitive man knows no distinction between fancy and reality. In truth, life would be impossible for such a simpleton. However primitive he may be, he cannot hold a fire in his hand by thinking of the frosty Caucasus. The difference between a real dinner and an imaginary one is palpable even to his limited intelligence. The hunter who could not distinguish between the game of his imagination and the reality could never earn a living.